Users Can No Longer Download Videos From Youtube

If you haven’t noticed it yet, all the youtube video downloading applications have stopped working. Obviously Youtube (Google) doesn’t like the fact that we are downloading all our favorite videos from this site without making them a profit. That’s why they launched their paid initiative, so that we pay for every MB of video we download.

Can’t Download from Youtube Anymore ??

A portion of the Youtube’s Terms of Service says :

You may access User Submissions for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the YouTube Website. You shall not copy or download any User Submission unless you see a download or similar link displayed by YouTube on the YouTube Website for that User Submission

I wasn’t aware of that ToS clause listed above. So downloading YouTube videos now become as illegal like Torrent? Hard to believe that YouTube could close all the holes to downloading (there used to be so many ways to download youtube videos).

NOTE : Although most youtube video download tools are not working. Zamar’s Youtube Video Conversion Tool (Link) seem to be working fine, but it takes twice the time (convert+download).

UPDATE : Video Download Helper for Firefox (Link) is working too. This is because it capture the video directly from the webpage. Thanks Amit.

It’s not clear if people will want to pay for downloading user-generated videos from YouTube. While Google continues to try to monetize YouTube, Hulu, with far less traffic than YouTube will be a better alternative for downloading free video content.